Interview with Stefan Heeke the CEO of the Sumall Foundation. How can we think about using big data and analysis to predict homelessness and other amazing projects? Big data is term that continues to increase and for us it can be misleading because it may not focus on the right data. It is easy to think about using data just to analyze our donors (tech tends to follow the money), so we love hearing about stories that drive impact from big data.

It doesn’t seem to be stopping…

Episode 7

Speaker 1: This is using the Whole Whale Podcast, a podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in a non-profit world. My name is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Good morning and welcome to episode 7 of using the Whole Whale. Today we’re talking about big data and we’ll be talking with a really amazing non-profit called the SumAll Foundation and with Stefan there but before we get started to share a little big data on Big Data. The term if you throw it into a Google search will throw back roughly 2 point, yeah 2.1 billion results. So it’s certainly a term used a lot in the news and if you’re looking for a trend, you remember that handy tool google.com/trends which will show us the incidence of search for given term that we put into it. I’ll throw in Big Data in there. Since 2011, you’ll see this nice, clean, up and down sort of climb and it factors up about 10x the amount of usage from 2011 to present day in 2014. So this is a term that is on the rise and rightly so because the amount of data stored on everything that we do, everything that we put online is only increasing but our ability necessary to turn that data into actions, you know, isn’t necessarily increasing at the same rate. And when people start to talk about and think about big data, you know, I’ll play this for you to give you an idea of what I mean.

“You can just send that forth. I don’t think I’ll miss what you think you’ll miss.”

Speaker 1: Exactly. So sometimes I don’t think it means what people think it means and we don’t necessarily use it for what I think we should use it for. And in this case, we’ll go to do this interview with Stefan and see how they approach using big data for big impact.

Hello, this is George Weiner and I’m here this SumAll Foundation with Stefan, can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: Yes, George. My name is Stefan Heeke. I’m the Executive Director of the SumAll Foundation, SumAll.org and SumAll.org is, is, has been founded by the, the owners of SumAll.com and on, on a technology start-up now having more than thirty employees. And the idea of SumAll.org is to create a non-profit arm within a tech company. And the owner said that that it’s not all about, businesses are all not about money that’s really an opportunity to use technology talent and, and the energy that’s available to, to help and use data for, for civic impact.

Speaker 1: So the term “big data” has turned around off a lot and of course it’s a very popular buzzword an